We would like to see an addictive Faith inspired game that could be compared to Mrmine.com or Cookie Clickers.

Neither of these projects is going to reach their funding targets, without a bona fide miracle.

The interesting thing to me, reading these campaigns, is how open and transparent they are about the aspirations of a Christian Video Game developer. A Christian Video Game is made to feed the pride of Christians (i.e. American Evangelicals) in their sub-culture / ghetto.

Call of Abraham states it is a “game you can be proud to give to your loved ones.” Grow Your Congregation says “We have yet to see a faith inspired game that people with faith could be proud to play.”

American evangelical attitudes to video games are roughly where its attitude to popular music was in the 70s. And the subculture had a great money spinning success in its invention of “Contemporary Christian Music”, or CCM (for which I’d very much recommend this synchroblog from last week). CCM didn’t convince many people outside the ghetto, but it allowed Christians to have pride in their music.

I totally get that. When I became a Christian in my teens, I was deeply into CCM. I subscribed to the magazine, went to gigs, bought the records. That CCM was derided outside the ghetto didn’t bother me. The point was that it was just good enough to allow me to have pride in it.

Christian gamers know that Christian Video Games are terrible. There have been many of them, promoted in language just like these Kickstarters. They are mostly a joke even within the subculture. That’s why pride is such a heartfelt need: the promise of a game that won’t be embarrassing to own. Not one that can compete with secular games or bring the Christian message to the wider world (the blurb explicitly says these are for “people with faith”), but one that reaches the lofty bar of not being total crap.

Now is the right time for this in games, I think. The last few years has seen a fundamental shift in the economics of game development. Independent game developers now top the “Game of the Year” lists. For a budget roughly equivalent to recording an album and promoting a new CCM artist, you can bring an Independent Game to market. It wouldn’t surprise me to see someone make this breakthrough, and transform the Christian Video Game from a joke even within its own sub-culture, to something that makes money.

The two Kickstarters above are like case-studies for how to make bad games, however. If, by some miracle, either got funded, there are enough details in the Kickstarter campaigns to know the result will be more embarrassing crap. There’s something fundamentally wrong-headed about how Christian Video Games are conceived. It is as if the CCM pioneers of the 70s couldn’t get past the fact that Christian music had to consist of Hymns played on a Pipe Organ, with a few guitars and drums added for good measure. In the same way Christian Video Games are Sunday School Lessons with added graphics.

But someone will get it eventually. And American Evangelicals will have their dearest wish: pride in the produce of their ghetto.

—

Anyone want to show me I’m wrong and point me at a Christian Video Game that doesn’t suck?

The War on Christmas isn’t waged with “Happy Holidays” or “Merry Christmas”es. It isn’t a battle between the erection of a Nativity, and the bells and wreaths of civic lights.

It is a battle between rampant consumerism on one hand, and family, love and peace on the other.

December is our annual orgy of consumption and capitalism. The time when more people get further into debt, when pressure to buy is at its greatest, and where more families break up.

By any sane measure, Christmas is losing.

And into this ‘War on Christmas’, the American Family Association rolls its artillery. Waging a black propaganda offensive with its own definition of ‘War on Christmas’. According to its ‘Naughty list‘, the true supporters of Christmas are the major retailers that most comprehensively use the festival in their advertising. Stores that encourage people to mark the celebration with purchases, consumption, consumerism and capitalism. Those stores are the true friends of the holiday.

Stores who refuse to take advantage of the religious holiday as a marketing gimmick? They’re naughty. And if they don’t embrace at least some minimal quantity of Christmas-branded marketing, the AFA will even call for a boycott.

So, a big blue thank you to Walmart, for cramming Christmas onto every product and advert it can, for paying its staff so poorly they need a food-drive, and for opening on Thanksgiving. In the world of the conservative Christian capitalist right, Walmart has it right, it gets the highest possible rating.

I have a suggestion. Let’s hold up as exemplary every store that refuses to put Christmas on any advert, any product that isn’t specifically religious, or any in-store signage. Let’s celebrate those stores who commit all year to paying living wages to their employees, sourcing products ethically, and putting customer needs before corporate profits. They are fighting on my side in the War on Christmas.

Let’s make no mistake, the AFA and its cronies worship no deity but Mammon. By studiously calling it ‘Christ’ or ‘God’, they hope to sucker the religious faithful into their idolatry.

After a rather acrimonious exchange with an evangelistic commenter, I’m reflecting on the technique they use to spread their views.

I’m not a natural salesman, but I’ve run my own businesses, and so I’ve depended on being able to sell, at least a little. There are a few things I’ve learned, from experience and from reading dozens of books:

1. Listen more than you talk. Assaulting someone with a wave of benefits doesn’t work. Find out where they are and what they need.

2. Ask questions. Even when you’ve finished listening, it is better to ask questions rather than to go into a sales pitch. Questions allow you to understand needs better, and lets the person you’re selling to understand that this is about their decision to buy, not your need to sell.

3. Use the terminology of the buyer. There are lots of jargon terms you use to think about your product. But the sales process isn’t about getting the buyer to speak your language, but being able to speak theirs.

4. Acknowledge the benefits of the alternatives. I often have been selling a service that otherwise the buyer would have to do themselves. So I acknowledge that they are my competition, and don’t diminish their skills. Even with other external competitors I acknowledge the competition and indicate the beneficial difference of what I’m selling.

5. Genuine flattery works. Except when it is obsequious, or obviously faked, when you can come across as two-faced. But honestly pointing out the obvious strengths of the buyer is a good way to build trust. Again, because I tend to be selling a service otherwise done in house, it is important that I make it clear I don’t think I am better than them or their team in a general sense. Just that their obvious expertise lies in one region, and mine in another, and they can get the best of both worlds if we join forces.

So five things that I think help my sales.

Five things I’m musing on, because — in my experience — the way folks are taught to evangelise is often the absolute opposite of these. So there have been several folks who’ve arrived on this blog with evangelistic zeal who:

1. launch into evangelistic spiels, without listening to what is said to them,

2. assume they know everything there is to know without asking any questions about where I am or what I think,

3. fill their comments with theological jargon,

4. deride any reasons I might have for thinking what I think (and as per 2, they have no idea what they might be), and

5. insult me.

Now, other than being quite willing to be as snarky and nasty back, I don’t really mind this. I quite enjoy arguments, and always have. There have been some folks on here who’ve found creative ways to insult me, and that’s always fun.

But what terrible sales technique. Why is it that evangelicalism, a religion based on the whole idea of spreading the faith, is so incompetent when it comes to sales technique?

Perhaps I should be glad. But it does seem odd.

Have you ever had a religious ‘sales’ experience that has done it right?

We have a new World Chess Champion. Magnus Carlsen, who I’ve mentioned before on the blog, is a young Norwegian grandmaster with a fascinating playing style. He beat the Indian world champion Viswanathan Anand in Chennai this week. I read the following warmup for a game in the series:

Carlsen is white and Anand black, and Carlsen will be looking to turn the white … advantage into a victory.

(I’ve clipped a key word out to make it more relevant to discussing…)

Race.

I noticed something else this week. After a computer game review that savaged the game for its racist content, the comments filled with white folks complaining that the game couldn’t be racist, because it a) wasn’t actually hurting anyone, and b) the creators didn’t intend to insult anyone. I wondered why the sudden battle over the definition of the word, why the comments had nothing to say about the actual ‘racism’ and everything about whether it was intentional.

Intent seems to matter mostly to people who benefit from privilege. Because the most important thing to them is to feel like they are not racist. They are reasonable people, who don’t hate anyone, so how can anything they do or say be racist? They want to make absolutely clear that they. are. not. racist.

Whatever racism means, it isn’t them. Whatever problems racism is supposed to indicate, they are are not part of.

So the myth of the white-hooded, cross-burning racist continues. To be racist you have to deny the promotion of the asian employee, out of conscious racial malice. You have to punch the hispanic student, specifically for hatred of that culture. You have to lynch the nigger.

As long as privilege gets to define what is problematic behavior, what deserves to be labelled and challenged, it remains in control. It can reserve its labels for the extremes, and avoid being challenged as it ensures its privilege continues. By and large, white guys write the dictionaries.

The “thing-that-white-folks-are-sure-isn’t-racism” is made of inertia, the toleration of inequity, the excusal of injustice and the perpetuation of privilege. A toxic mess that no individual causes or holds the blame for.

Thinking these things reminded me of that racially-ambiguous quote from the chess world championship. I asked an old school friend, and keen chess player, whether he could quantify the ‘white advantage’. About a fifth of a pawn, was his guess.

I don’t think of myself as racist. Does anyone? I don’t think of myself as part of the problem. But I have to concede I go into every match with, at minimum, a fifth of a pawn advantage. If that’s not racism, then I’m not sure the word is very useful.

How about you? Are you willing to admit you’re racist, and to try to identify how? Or is racism someone else’s problem, as perpetrator or victim?

I love the bible, particularly the New Testament. I love it in the way I love my slide-rule: I’ve had it for a long time; I enjoy playing with it; I enjoy knowing stuff about it; I like the connection it gives me to an earlier time; and I like the look of it on my shelf.

I don’t, however, think it is very useful. At least, for any particular problem I can imagine it solving, I can think of many other resources that would be better suited to the task. It is a beloved curiosity.

The bible, I think, is a religious book of its time and context. Just a religious book of its time and context. It is no more special in its time and context than the book of Mormon is in its, or the writings of Baha’u’llah, Gurdjieff, or LRH; the Bagavad Gita, the Analects or the Qur’an.

All of which may be deeply profound to some, but all of which would be utterly pointless reads to the average reader arriving at the text unprimed.

The point is, if you actually read the bible without being primed to think it is holy, True (in some sense), important, or special, the text is simply not very impressive. It is tedious, tribal, occasionally uplifting, ludicrous, far fetched, even more tedious, and alienating.

It takes hard work, perhaps sustained by naive enthusiasm, to get much out of the bible. But the same is true of any work of literature, spiritual or fictional or both. If I went back 30 years now, to talk to my former self about what to spend my life studying, I’d be hard pressed to give good reasons to choose the bible over Shakespeare, say, or Bach, or any other cultural artefact. At least those alternatives are easier to derive pleasure from, on a shallow level. I don’t regret the choice I made, I just don’t think I somehow picked perfectly.

Even most Christians barely, if ever, read it of their own volition. Unless guilted into a daily ‘quiet time’, or in the context of a church bible study (and even then it is usually cut into tiny edifying pieces, provided with ample ‘correct answers’ for why they are to find it profound). Most Christians don’t read it because they don’t enjoy it or get much out of it.

Of course there might be a small proportion of exceptions. But if you’ve spent any time with Shakespeare scholars, or (especially perhaps) fans of Joyce, you’ll see the same passion for the subtleties, the same willingness to be moved by the deeper interpretations.

The average person would simply not make it through the bible, and most of the few who did would be utterly baffled at what the fuss is about.

I think those people who claim the bible is some ultimately wonderful book, chock full of important truth and unique in human history are either deluding themselves, or have never seriously read one of its competitors.